Assignment- Tyrant's Bride

by Will B Aarons

  1

  Durell had had plenty of time to think about it.

  Still it seemed a fool’s errand to steal a woman.

  State had spent a week obtaining clearance from President for Life Field Marshal Azo Ausi to photograph her. Durell’s agency, K Section, which was the troubleshooting arm of the CIA, had invested another week gathering and briefing the magazine crew. Most recently there was the flight, interminable hours from D.C. to Paris, to Cairo, to Nairobi, to Zanzibar.

  And the doubts worried and rankled: a fool’s errand.

  The hot alley where he waited was lined with vendors, crowded with haggling buyers; the air reeked of browning rice and onions, hot oil and spices. Merchandise of all shapes and colors was stacked neatly in opensided stalls, or swung on strings. Bright fabrics folded over poles hung limp in the still, hot air. Merchants sat cross-legged and called for passersby to inspect their wares.

  Durell’s eyes were fretful. "General Ogwang is late,” he said.

  "Are you to be met by a general, then?” The Shirazi spoke without much interest. He kept a bland gaze on the crowded street.

  "You knew that,” Durell said.

  "I know nothing.”

  Durell felt alarm wriggle under his skin. Up to now they had spoken only to confirm recognition. "You met me at the airport: you brought me here. If General Albert Ogwang didn’t hire you, who did?”

  The Shirazi’s black face made an impassive mask. "No general: maybe one of his people. We are to wait,” he said. "For what or whom...” His voice trailed away, and his shoulders shrugged. They were the heavy shoulders of a fisherman—fishing had been the traditional vocation of Zanzibar’s Shirazis for hundreds of years. But this man was no simple fisherman: he could be a thug, with his two-tone shoes and expensive jacket that showed the underarm bulge of a gun. On his head sat a kofia va mkono, an expensive cap embroidered in traditional designs, favored by Moslems. And Durell remembered that Field Marshal Ausi was a Moslem.

  Durell regarded the man with wary eyes and considered that he could be reliably straight, hired by General Ogwang however circuitously, or he could be working for Field Marshal Ausi. Which would mean this probably was a death trap for Durell.

  Or he could be working for someone in the middle.

  Even for himself.

  In Durell’s business, you never knew.

  Rays of late tropical sunlight bounced wall to whitewashed wall, making shadows sinister. More and more frequently there came askaris, African watchmen on the way to their posts, beds balanced on their heads, lanterns and sticks for weapons. They kept watch over shops and homes throughout the night.

  The Shirazi saw that Durell’s impatience was growing. He beckoned to an Arab coffee vendor and said, in Swahili, that too much hurry brings no blessings: "Haraka, haraka, haina baraka.”

  "There is a proper pace for everything,” Durell retorted.

  The vendor rattled up, two decorated cups in one hand, tapered brass pot in the other. A water bowl used to rinse the cups dangled from his little finger.

  The coffee was black and scalding as Durell raised his eyes, scanning latticed balconies that leaned out on ancient mangrove beams. Shutters gaped for air. Evening tinged the sky. Tongues mingled a thousand syllables, harsh and musical.

  Durell’s mouth burned from the coffee. "You didn’t say who hired you.” His voice was calm but insistent.

  "You said maybe one of the general’s people. Tell me more.”

  "Just wait.”

  The man’s gun did not worry Durell, but he couldn’t take him here on a crowded street. There was no way to make him say more out here. Waiting was half the game, anyhow.

  His dark-blue eyes swung up to the balconies again. Ogwang was known to be secretive and suspicious and to have enough money to do things any way he liked. He could be up there somewhere watching him—but sooner or later he would be forced to come down. He couldn’t back out now: the operation already was under way in the north.

  The mission to steal a woman.

  Durell watched the cramped street with its stench of alleys, the briny rock of a stone-bulwarked harbor nearby, the cooking odors and, over all, a thin, cloying fragrance that reminded him this was the island of cloves. The noisy swirl of humanity included caste-marked Hindus in pastel saris; Arab Moslems shrouded head to ankle in black buibuis; Africans in vibrantly hued kangas. Their sisal baskets bulged with tiny eggplants and onions and hot peppers and mangoes.

  He cursed under his breath and waited some more, and sweat stained the shirt beneath his blue tie, and anger darkened his eyes almost to black, the way it always did.

  Now, behind his stalker’s eyes, he felt himself the quarry, a creeping feeling at the back of the neck. He turned, saw flashes of green in the irises that shone above a black veil.

  "Sam Durell?” she said.

  "Tafadhali, remove your veil,” he replied in Swahili. "You know her?” he asked the Shirazi, turning away.

  The man flared the whites of his eyes. "Jali hapo!” he shouted.

  The cry to look out came almost too late, but a life of danger had honed Durell’s reflexes to a fine edge. His elbow slapped the broad side of a dagger blade, deflected it harmlessly past his ribs.

  The knife had come at him from inside the woman’s buibui, its point ripping through the black fabric with razor sharpness.

  She narrowed her eyes and caught a sound in her throat, whipped the knife high, tried for him again, but his knuckles slammed the soft flesh of her forearm and sent the knife skittering.

  She winced in shocked pain and darted into the crowd.

  Durell did a quick take on the Shirazi, who saw that he wasn’t to be trifled with. "She was the one, bwana; she hired me. But I didn’t know it was to kill you—”

  Durell was already running down the stall-bordered lane. He heard the Shirazi’s two-toned shoes clatter behind. The small figure of the woman wove with some ease through the heavy pedestrian traffic. Motor vehicles were not allowed in the old Arab Stone Town, but parking lots were nearby, and now she switched up an alley toward one. Durell was a big man but fast on his feet, with the casual agility of youth, despite the flecks of gray in the sideburns of his thick, black hair.

  Shops that sold shells, pottery, ropes and mats flashed past. Strollers snarled and cursed in his barging wake. Dogs yapped. A police officer’s whistle sounded somewhere back there.

  Open sky with spongy, violet-bottomed clouds.

  The black-clad nub of the woman’s head bobbing among cars.

  The parking lot—the same in which Durell's vehicle had been left. She disappeared; a door slammed; a high-powered engine snarled and a red Aston-Martin screeched for the street.

  Durell lunged for the Shirazi’s yellow Toyota and demanded the man’s keys. Breathing heavily, he handed them over without argument.

  "Get in.” Durell threw open a door and slid behind the wheel. He cranked the starter.

  "You must pay me—” the Shirazi began, then ducked his head and dived into the rear seat as Durell toed the accelerator and snapped the clutch. They lurched from the parking space and into a tire-screaming turn that brought the Aston-Martin into view a block away. He kept the gas pedal down, honking and weaving. He closed the gap briefly, but she must have seen him. She pulled away again. She was a good driver.

  They whizzed past whitewashed export buildings, then the stone tower of an ancient Portuguese-built fort. The harbor was glassy under the approach of twilight; dhows with bleached planking waited the change of monsoon to carry their trade goods to India and Arabia, while modem freighters loaded their holds with copra and cloves.

  Durell’s eyes were intent on the red car.

  Thoughts came,
even if there was no time to consider them.

  Who was this woman who’d tried to knife him in the back? Not just who: what were her alliances? Where was her place in the web that would have had him dead, but for the warning of a split second? Was the web that of Field Marshal Ausi, or someone else?

  Away from the harbor, going out of the older city, motor traffic thickened, but most blocks were free of people in the street, and that was a blessing. They were in Ngambo, the African quarter. Since the overthrow of the sultans it had become the hub of civic life. The Toyota eased closer to the tail of the zigzagging sports car.

  "Slow down, bwana. Stop the car.” The Shirazi’s voice was not afraid.

  Durell concentrated on the street ahead. "Did the bibi tell you who she was?”

  "Hapana."

  "I intend to find out, then.”

  "There was a mutual acquaintance. She had the money; I did the job.”

  "If we lose her, maybe your friend can tell us more.”

  "That would be improper.”

  "Improper?”

  "To involve my friend. I told you to stop the car.”

  "I’m sorry; I can’t do that.”

  "It belongs to my friend. It must not be damaged.”

  Durell kept his eyes on the road and tossed his wallet to the man. "Help yourself. There’s more where that came from,” he said.

  They were beyond the old slaver district and passing Lenin Hospital, which Durell had heard was manned by Chinese doctors. The Shirazi was quiet. There came a drab precision of concrete workers’ bungalows that melded into whitewashed housing for Indian families, where saris billowed on washlines, and potted plants adorned windowsills and roofs. Durell’s wallet fell onto the seat at his side, empty, of course. The sacrifice had been small, twenty or thirty dollars in Tanzanian shillings. He had signed vouchers for five thousand dollars from K Section’s Green Fund just prior to departure.

  Now he remembered: that was when General Dickinson McFee, the little gray chief of K Section, had told him:

  "Don’t trust General Albert Ogwang.”

  "I don’t trust any of it, sir,” Durell had replied. "That includes Kenneth Dager, in spite of his six years of experience in Africa; and his father, even if he is a senator.”

  "Careful, Samuel.” McFee raised a cautionary finger. "Thurmond Dager is a man of great influence. He’s not to be taken lightly.” His eyes were the color of the gray suit he wore; the color of Washington’s gray ice and gray weeping sky, which you couldn’t see from inside 20 Annapolis Street for the simple reason that security required all its windows to be false.

  "I don’t take anyone lightly who can swing the Company onto something like this in spite of itself, sir.”

  "Don’t judge too hastily,” McFee said. "The Russians, with the help of their Cuban straw men, aim to build a belt of alliances and dependencies that will cut Africa in two. It could be used to throttle the west’s access to strategic minerals in the quiet economic struggles that seem bound to last for decades , unless outright hostilities erupt, God forbid. Mobundu is right in the path of Russia’s wooing arms, but it could go either way—particularly if Field Marshal Azo Ausi is toppled. And it took Dager to tell us that Ausi may be about to overreach himself for the first time since his violent takeover nearly a decade ago. If we can take advantage of that mistake, Mobundu is where we may be able to keep the belt of Soviet influence from closing.”

  "It’s not going to be easy to steal his wife, right from the Presidential Palace,” Durell said.

  "Of course not; that’s why you are in charge of it,” McFee had replied.

  Now, with a banana-laden truck blocking his view of the red Aston-Martin, Durell frankly did not think it could be done—and he broke out in a fine sweat each time he considered the hazards. The way things were going today only confirmed his fears.

  He bit his lip, took his chance against the rush of an oncoming car and charged around the banana truck. He breathed a sigh of relief, shifted his hands on the wheel. She was still there, three blocks ahead. They raced through a shanty town made of stiff, grayed palm leaves and rusty tin cans. Junk lay everywhere, and he swerved around something in the road. There was sheet metal, iron, tin cans, car parts, anything that might be beaten into a useful object. Women prodded at the soil with their hoes. Chickens scratched and pecked.

  She was headed north, on the road to Bububu, and they roared into the countryside. Out here a seawind heaved coconut palms and piles of reddish cloves dried beside their groves. There were cinnamon and nutmeg trees, too, as small thatch villages hurtled past. Ngawala fishing boats were pulled up on the beaches.

  Ahead, brake lights of the Aston-Martin flickered for a herd of humpbacked cattle that ambled across the road. Durell caught up to her then and rode her bumper. The sun vanished behind the vast African mainland to the west, and suddenly it was night. Durell tugged his collar loose. There was little relief in the muggy darkness.

  "Where can she be going?” the Shirazi wondered. "Maybe to the general.”

  "This general, he wishes to kill you?”

  "I didn’t think so. I don’t know.”

  The Shirazi’s Swahili held a humorous intonation. "He called, and you came all the way from the United States of America to be killed?”

  "That was not my intention,” Durell said.

  He squinted into the beams of his headlights. He could conceive of no reason why General Ogwang would harm him, but the general was little known. It was a complicated matter, as the boys in Analysis and Synthesis had said. First you had to understand about this woman named Teresa: she wasn’t only President for Life Field Marshal Azo Ausi’s wife—she was General Albert Ogwang’s as well. What happened, they had told Durell, was that Ausi had captured her after Ogwang was defeated, or as good as defeated, and had married her, whether it was legal or not, to humiliate Ogwang further. More important than her relationship to Ogwang, however, was the fact that she was the only known survivor of the once-ruling Kabaka’s royal line.

  Another thing you had to understand was that the deceased Kabaka and General Ogwang were members of the Ndolo tribe, a warrior caste that had pushed down from the sub-Sahara in the seventeenth century to invade what is present-day Mobundu, which it had ruled ever since, retaining token sovereignty even under the Germans and British.

  But Field Marshal Ausi was of the vassal Awaki tribe, many of whose members had been raised up by the British in order to dilute Ndolo influence.

  And, after independence, when Ausi had overthrown the Kabaka, General Ogwang led the Ndolo in a bloody civil war to restore the monarchy.

  Only now was Ausi confident enough of his power to avenge himself on the Ndolo. The confirmed word of Kenneth Dager, former Peace Corps volunteer, now adviser to African heads of state, had it that Ausi’s revenge would amount to the extinction of the entire, million-strong Ndolo tribe.

  Genocide.

  The Ndolo were disorganized and dispirited, but there was hope, the Joint Chiefs and NSC had agreed. If General Ogwang could be smuggled back to the Ndolo to organize and direct their resistance, it was even possible that Ausi’s ragtag army would disintegrate in the field. Which would mean the end of Ausi.

  But then came the real complication, said the boys in Analysis and Synthesis: Ogwang reluctantly had agreed to return and direct operations, only on condition that his wife, Teresa, who now was living as Ausi’s wife, be snatched from the Presidential Palace and returned to the Ndolo at the same time. He claimed they would rally only to her, the last of the royal line. Then he could take command under the legitimacy of her auspices.

  Durell thought it seemed plausible enough.

  But it also was possible that General Ogwang, who already had lost one war with Field Marshal Ausi, just took the chance to get Teresa back and had no intention of staying and fighting.

  The yellow Toyota whirred behind the Aston-Martin, past burial plots of wealthy Indians, mausoleums, chapels, flower-clad temples to the dead
. But the dead were being moved, and the cemetery that overlooked moon-frosted Zanzibar Strait was heaved and pitted. Tanzania’s government had decided such settings better served the living than the dead.

  After all, Durell thought, the people up north were already committed—if anything happened to him, they would guess it was Ausi’s work and continue until they had freed Teresa, assuming that was possible. Meanwhile Ogwang could cite Durell’s death as evidence of lax security and lie low until time to pick Teresa up at the border and go his merry way.

  You did tend to suspect the motives of others in this business, Durell thought. And sometimes it saved your life.

  Some of those already working under the president for life’s nose were close to Durell. Such as Willie Wells, once a mercenary soldier, now an ace K Section agent and among the tiny circle of Durell’s personal friends.

  And some were very close to him. One of those was Deirdre Padgett.

  The only woman he’d ever loved.

  The Aston-Martin had led into a grassy lane among coconut trees, evidently a plantation. Split nuts lay in rows for drying. There were thousands of them; the white moonlight glared against their meat like so many skulls. The smell of sea salt mingled with the perfume of the ilang-ilang as the humid breeze rattled fronds.

  "She’s stopping,” the Shirazi said.

  "Then I’ll just stop, too,” Durell said.

  "Of course.”

  He saw house lights dimly through the distance and salt haze. Then the girl’s black robe fluttered across the brilliance of his high beams, and she ran into the trees. He hopped out, heard the Shirazi’s door slam behind, tried to adjust his eyes—then felt the dismay of cold steel against his neck.

  ''Tafadhali,” the Shirazi said in a polite but edgy tone, "do not move. I have a gun on you.”

  2

  "I will call the bibi,” the Shirazi said.

  Durell moved his head carefully, looked around, saw the pale shine of the man’s grin. "You were in it with her all the way,” he said. "Why did you wait?”

  "I wasn’t. But you gave me your money; perhaps she will give me hers.”